2001 Volume 32 Issue 7 Pages 163-169
Robotics is expected to be applied to human oriented tasks such as in medical and welfare fields as well as in industrial manufacturing. In order to carry out a cooperative task between human and robot smoothly, contact force should be utilized effectively. In this study, we consider the contact force as information on which human's intention is reflected for the accomplishment of the contact tasks. A pneumatic parallel manipulator is available for the human friendly mechanical system due to the feature of multiple d.o.f. for its compact mechanism and that of essential flexibility originated from air compressibility. Moreover this manipulator works as kind of an elastic body even when its position and orientation is under control, which means it works as an omni-directional force sensor itself Utilizing such elastic characteristics positively to detect contact information, we propose a scheme to estimate a contact force vector and contact point which are applied by a human. The validity of the proposed scheme is confirmed through some experiments.
